Determine Nutritional Requirements for Space Missions?

Space exploration represents a new frontier in the nutritional sciences and humans are eating in space since Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 108mmflight in 1961. Human presence in space has been almost continuous since these early flights. Missions have ranged from about 15 minutes to 14 months. Until the beginning of the International Space Station, all human habitable spacecrafts were built by Soviet Union or the United States, and both countries have made enormous contributions to the human space flight capabilities, sciences and technology. Throughout the history of human space flight, life sciences research has been an integral part of the missions. As the mission duration increased, the framework of nutritional research has expanded dramatically.

Varied environmental conditions away from the planet earth are bound to bring certain changes in the body composition of astronauts which might influence the nutrient needs. So before we move on to the nutrient needs, let us study about these changes in the body composition.